NEW YORK  A musical with a big heart and even bigger heels took home the top prize at last night’s Tony Awards.

“Kinky Boots,” the saga of a factory that makes fab footwear for guys who dress as gals, was named best musical at the 67th edition of the annual awards honoring Broadway theater.

The movie-based show took home six Tonys in all, including the lead-actor prize for Billy Porter, who plays the unstoppable drag queen Lola.

“Boots” hustled past its top competition, “Matilda,” the musical about a little girl’s furious love for literature. That British import, based on a book by Roald Dahl, wound up with four Tonys.

Speaking of tenacious females, “Boots” composer Cyndi Lauper, the ‘80s pop queen and onetime Broadway actor, became the first solo woman ever to win the Tony for original score.

“I can’t say I wasn’t practicing in front of the shower curtain” for an acceptance speech, Lauper admitted onstage at New York’s Radio City Music Hall.

Lauper, who made her Broadway acting debut in “The Threepenny Opera” seven years ago (and said she learned to sing from her mother’s Broadway cast albums), thanked “Boots” writer Harvey Fierstein for calling her to collaborate: “I’m glad I was done doing the dishes and answered the phone.”

And a prickly comedy that’s coming to the Old Globe Theatre next year won the best-play prize: Christopher Durang’s “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike,” a saga of dissipated siblings that riffs off Anton Chekhov’s classic “Uncle Vanya.”

But Nicholas Martin, the Globe associate artist who was nominated as best director for “Vanya,” lost out to Pam MacKinnon of “Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” He had been at least a moderate favorite given the momentum for “Vanya,” which had six nominations and such high-profile actors as Sigourney Weaver and David Hyde Pierce. (Martin will direct the Globe production as well, although most likely with a different cast.)

The 67th Tonys were a remarkably democratic edition: “Matilda” and the revival of the musical “Pippin” each won four, and the revival of Edward Albee's "Woolf" had three wins.

“Pippin” was named best musical revival, and Patina Miller won the leading-actress prize for her turn as the Leading Player in that show.

“The Nance,” directed by former Old Globe artistic chief Jack O’Brien, took three Tonys, all in design categories.

Things were neck and neck between “Kinky Boots” and “Matilda” for a while, with “Boots” also winning for choreography (Jerry Mitchell), orchestrations (Stephen Oremus) and sound design (John Shivers), and “Matilda” taking the Tonys for featured actor in a musical (Gabriel Ebert), book (Dennis Kelly), lighting (Hugh Vanstone) and set design (Rob Howell).

Costume designer Gregg Barnes, an El Cajon native, Globe associate artist and two-time previous Tony-winner, was also nominated for “Boots.” But the award for costuming a musical went to William Ivey Long of “Cinderella.”

The night’s biggest upset had to be Tracy Letts’ win as lead actor in the revival of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Letts, who is also a Tony- and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright (“August: Osage County”), triumphed over multiple Oscar-winner Tom Hanks, who had been talked about as a lock for the award thanks to his turn in “Lucky Guy,” the late writer Nora Ephron’s last work.